Dystopian fiction is so hot right now. Hot like teen vampires before it. And child wizards before that. Hot like Chris Pine, and Michael B. Jordan, and J-Law. Hot like a Ron DeSantis book-burning. In Florida. In July. Hot like our annually warming planet.
Speaking as someone who read The Giver, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Z for Zachariah, Ender’s Game, Lord of the Flies, 1984, Animal Farm, The Handmaid’s Tale, Anthem, and even A Clockwork Orange all within the state-sanctioned strictures of the Georgia public school system (that last one was a Directed Study pick, but it was still very much on the taxpayer’s dime), it’s hard not to look back and think my teachers weren’t trying to tell us something. There were years where our entire lit curriculum was little more than a series of increasingly relevant warnings, written years before we were born about years we were about to reach; about the country we were growing up in and, presumably, expected to save. I don’t know if I even realized at the time how lucky I was to have had two of the most liberal-minded English teachers in the (then-red, now-purple) state (along with a couple of very progressive history teachers), all of whom I fear would have a hard time staying employed amidst our current educational/political climate (they are all, thankfully, long retired).
Now I don’t want to get too “back in my day whippersnapper …” with this framing device—I haven’t read The Hunger Games or any of the other buzzworthy apocalyptica that’s taken YA shelves by storm in recent years. But the sense I get is that much of it leans heavily into the surfacey sci-fi/adventure elements that most of the aforementioned classics employed more as a kind of candy-coating to help the medicine go down (ie—it’s there, but it’s not the point, and it’s certainly not supposed to be fun). And the very fact that the genre has become commodified in this way—spawning a commercial behemoth of endless copycat book series and assembly-line TV and film adaptations—can definitely sometimes feel a bit like self-fulfilling prophecy; like the very snake we were warned about gobbling up its own tail. If anything’s changed, it’s the directive. Twenty-five years ago, these ideas still felt manageable (the panda/whale/rainforest-centric environmentalism of my youth seems laughably quaint today) but now, most of them have arrived at our doorstep, extremely unmanaged, knocking loudly, asking for our votes, or worse yet, asking us to accept that our votes no longer matter. If the dystopian message of the 90s was “look out, this is coming” then the dystopian message of the 2020s is decidedly closer to “buckle up, this is here.”
Put another way, perhaps the true challenge in writing meaningful dystopian fiction in 2023 comes in recognizing that the distant future is, in all likelihood, simply not going to be a thing; in respecting readers enough to acknowledge that, and still working to find the hope amid our collective hopelessness. After all, 1984 was nearly 40 years ago. And 2049 (the year in which Fahrenheit 451 is set) is just around the corner. Go much further than that, and you’re more-or-less dutybound to get apocalyptic, rather than functionally dystopic. We all know too much—about what’s already happened, and what’s yet to come—and with our Damoclean ozone layer hanging dark over our heads, the intervening unraveling of the world is what Hay sets out to explore. His new novel NSFW is, in many ways, (and by its own epigraphed admission), a Frankensteinian monster of endtimes prophecy, bioengineered to rise up and meet our specific historical moment.
NSFW’s future—though clearly tongue-in-cheek—never feels all that far off, nor does it strike this reader as particularly unlikely. Imagining a world shaped both by the continued fallout from the Coronavirus pandemic, as well as some nebulous, global gamechanger cyberattack referred to only as “the hack” (something that, on some queasy gut level, we all know is probably coming, and have been quietly dreading amongst ourselves at least since 9/11)—one in which people are no longer glued to their phones, but essentially parasitic hosts for them—one in which the Cronenbergian melding of off- and online life posited last year in David Leo Rice’s groundbreaking essay “Long Live the Heroic Pervert” is not only a reality, but one so long-past as to no longer even warrant comment—Hay dares to jump still further ahead, to the catastrophe-after-next—to predict beyond the predictable—to boldly envision the symphonic, cacophonic, kakistocratic culmination of all the shit we failed to deal with the first (and second) (and third) time around and say yes, this too is in the cards.
Ferociously funny, right up until it’s not (as only the best satire can be), his merry band of microdosing content warriors bring to dizzying, miraculous life a most visceral expression of that ‘it’s-already-too-lateness’ that has come to define our still-young century. Logging unconscionably long hours as real-time internet censors, furiously pedaling in place toward the dangling, rotten, “15-Million Merit” carrot of socioeconomic stability, they comprise a makeshift dysfunctional family as relatable as any office sitcom. In his reluctant hero @Sa>ag3 we are gifted a true successor to Winston Smith, the ultimate go-along-to-get-along hardcase moved to question, and care, and risk, and revolt, all for a taste of true happiness the likes of which he’d long ago given up any hope of knowing. His partner-in-passionate-crime @Jun1p3r is an avenging angel of the dark web, equal parts Greek Fury and Matrix Trinity, her pyroclastic rage against the fall of mankind, and her flickering hope in one final man conspiring to set her aflame. Together (along with their beloved pet jellyfish), they do their best to bear witness to the dying of the light; their compatriots shuffled off, one-by-one, snuffed out by big business, bigger tech, and extreme overexposure to the daily banalities of uploaded evil, until there’s both nowhere left to go, and nothing left to do but run.
Less a paint-by-numbers map to ruin than a multi-tabbed browser window into the fracturing of reality, NSFW is a fatidic cyberwitch’s brew of dark matter and darker art—a concession to the slow-dawning, but fast-snowballing realization that this cherished concept we have called ‘the truth’ is not only passé and naïve; but that it’s over. That our ongoing lust for more of it has led to the irrevocable destabilization of all of it. That there is, in fact, no one single ‘there’ there, and likely never has been; that the only real fight left is the one between the truth you’re fed, and the truth you create for yourself. I think this, more than anything, is what my wonderful teachers wanted me and my generation to learn from all those great dystopian works.
In the same way, by plotting out our prospective fates, from consumptive consumerism and technofascist anarchy, to self-care hedonism and class war Armageddon, Hay’s last (and greatest) message still somehow emerges, above all that societal fray, as one of fervid belief in the deepest, rawest aspects of human love. In adding his outrageous countercultural philippic to a tradition that includes A Clockwork Orange, Brazil, Fight Club, and Mr. Robot, he will break your brain, and then he will break your heart. And while not hopeful in his conclusions—scientific, narrative, or otherwise—he remains steadfastly hopeful in his telling; in his trying; in his warning. Indeed, in the very existence of a book like NSFW, one has to glimpse a gleam of hope. That it’s not too late. That there is still time. And that, though unsparing and unflinching in its predictions for our selfie-immolating world and its foul devices, it is still, after all, (as only the best satire can be), a love story.
NSFW, by David Scott Hay. Whiskey Tit, February 2023. 464 pages. $18.00, paper.
Dave Fitzgerald is a writer living and working in Athens, Georgia. He contributes sporadic film criticism to DailyGrindhouse.com and Cinedump.com, and his first novel, Troll, is set to be released early next year. He tweets @DFitzgerraldo.
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